“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”

30 October 2012

PARACOMBE WINERY HITS TOP FOR 20TH

Twenty years ago, give or take a few minutes, a new wine region called the Adelaide Hills decided to stage its first regional wine festival. I recall being in a crowded and noisy room somewhere in Hahndorf, sitting at a desk lined with glasses, when a huge paw thrust through the mob, proffering another red.

“What do you think of that?” its owner asked.

I sniffed it, and looked at the very big man away off on the other end of that arm.

“Have you got ironstone?” I asked, recognizing the tell tale whiff of things ferruginous in that dense, glowering Shiraz.

“Well I’ll be buggered,” the fellow said. “How do you know that?”

It turned out to be Paul Drogemuller, of Paracombe Wines. Within a few weeks I was in his tractor shed, kicking barrels. We were instant friends. Turned out he’d lost a lot of property, including his collection of old motorbikes, in the Ash Wednesday bushfires and had then run a farm supplies store until one way or another he’d decided to jump into the wine business and plant a vineyard.

He wisely chose an upland basin immediately north of the Torrens Gorge atop the plateau at Paracombe. It faced the south and east, so it drew the gentle morning sun rather than the afternoon scorcher. This reinforced its cool nature, and ensured fruit of good natural acidity. While the place exuded a serene calm, it nevertheless seemed wild and high and remote: a very long way from the suburbs only minutes off, at the foot of Anstey’s Hill. But from Droggie’s shed you could look across the Gorge to the new vineyards at Lenswood, where great names like Knappstein, Weaver and Henschke were planting very widely-touted vineyards, or replacing others that had been cindered in those disastrous fires.

That day we walked the tidy vineyard, kicking lumps of ironstone and sandstone aside, and in there in his shed amongst the tractors and dust tasted dark old barrels of beautifully perfumed, intense reds: the aforementioned Shiraz, and you little beauty: a stunning Cabernet franc, the most prettily aromatic variety of Bordeaux. This was an even scarcer rarity in those days.

And then this big man shyly pulled out a bottle of sparkling Chardonnay and Pinot noir, mumbled something about his love of fine fizz, disgorged it with a pop and a shoosh of froth, and poured a glass.

It was a refined, elegant and delicious dry sparkler, easily in the league of the posh stuff from the Piccadilly Valley, where an effusive degree of public relations fluff and bluster had been devoted to the promotion of the new fizz from Petaluma’s Bridgewater Mill.

We drank that bold certificate of assertion with Paul’s vivacious wife Kath, pregnant again after having a bonnie son, Ben. These were honest, open-hearted country people who had boldly, but with an uncommon intelligence chosen this very special spot to commence a way of life they have relentlessly stuck to.

There were always neighbours about the farm, assisting with this and that; lending a bulldozer here, a tractor there, some muscle whenever the big man’s wasn’t quite enough. People seemed to queue up to help. I soon learned about the couple’s German heritage, and only became aware of Paracombe’s proximity to Lobethal, the Vale of Love, when I heard somebody joke about Paul having to “go all the way over there across the River to get a wife.”

However you look at it, that was a journey well made.

Gradually a modern winery appeared. As the kids grew, the family would spend weekends mixing concrete to pour reinforced walls on the big slab neighbors had helped establish. Each weekend they’d raise the wall made the week before, and pour another. Paul assembled bits and pieces of winemaking kit, and gradually a handsome and substantial winery complex grew, overlooking the Gorge on one side, and that beautifully tidy basin of vines on the other.

It was delightful to watch the wines emerge. Those reds were soon joined by others: refined, austere Cabernet sauvignon; a gently-oaked Chardonnay; a Riesling, from a neighbour’s vineyard at Holland Creek, as crisp and fresh as a mountain brook, and perhaps most significantly, a bright, zippy Sauvignon blanc. The Marlborough explosion of this new variety had barely seen its fuse lit in those early ’nineties, and the Paracombe version immediately took its place foremost amongst them, and has since been a favourite in Adelaide. To me it always seemed lighter than most of the Kiwi flood, a more frivolous and casual wine on the one hand, but dead serious in its precise elegance and refinement: it’s part slide rule and part party.

While Paul and his mates and kin built the winery and the suite of very fine Paracombe wines, Kath would strap her babies in the car and do the rounds of Adelaide’s wine stores and restaurants, quickly developing a reputation for being the last lady in Australia to whom one owed a debt. When you had Kath Drogemuller standing by your cash register, waiting for a cheque, you got that bloody pen out lickety-split.

As the coat of infant drawings on the Drogemuller kitchen fridge gradually took more teenaged form, Kath worked up a distinctive, stylish label featuring that single berry sitting on a slice of sandstone, its parameter so stained with iron from the ground around it that it looks to the unwitting so much like a slice of crusty bread you could eat it.

Then Paul, having failed to convince its owner to sell him a nearby vineyard of Shiraz that was already ancient when John Davouren used it for his St Henri Clarets in the ’fifties, managed instead to buy each individual vine, which he dug up and moved to his own vineyard, one-by-one. Those old strugglers sit around the homestead now, in dramatic contrast to the perfectly neat rows of the new vineyard, which is as cute and orderly as a manicured tea plantation. The uninitiated might suggest that in comparison, those oldies look a bit like the tattered rows of Napoleon’s troops staggering home from St Petersberg, the weight of defeat heavy upon them, but uh-huh, that old legion’s smug and happy, and makes the Paracombe super-red, the right royal Somerville. One of my major poetic heroes, the great Charles Bukowski famously wrote “the days run away like wild horses over the hills,” which is exactly what happened between those bonnie, part naïve times, and the big dinner the Drogemullers put on a week back to celebrate their twentieth annual wine release.

It was one of those nights when you feel the warm security of a family of substance; a tribe whose decades of quiet, determined, uncomplaining travail and endeavour have finally stacked up to make one of our most admired, yet understated wine businesses.

As Advertiser wine writer Tony Love quietly asserted, it felt like a family wedding, with speech after congratulatory speech from folks who’d been in on it since the beginning. Even the accountant stood up and told bad jokes about “birds”. Anne Oliver conjured delicious tucker in the well-appointed kitchen Paul had built atop the winery, and we sat there like royalty in the dining room, celebrating a very special family’s brilliant success.

I shall review the newest suite of Paracombe wines over the next weeks. In the meantime, you’d better jump in and order your 2009 Ruben red. This $21 blend of Merlot, Cabernet sauvignon, Cabernet franc, Malbec and Shiraz presented the Drogemullers with a jim-dandy anniversary present last Thursday: out of the 3,170 wines in the Royal Melbourne Wine Show, it won the highest points of them all.

Droggie and the author. Paul is indeed a large fellow, with a heart to match.

4 comments:

Vanessa Hall
said...

I always love what and how Philip writes. And to his word, the Paracombe Wine brand is unique and does the Adelaide Hills proud. I love how Kath stomps the pavement, lickety spilt. Good work (again) Whitey. Cheers Ness - there goes an AFD... I always reach for a glass when PW is the author.

Great article! My partner and I love spending open days at Paracombe Winery with our friends "tasting" all the great wines even though we have tried them all previously and know how much we love them! The Cabernet Franc is fantastic!

.

Hit the image above to confound yourself with some of the most complex geology of any vignoble on Earth.This is not a soil map. In Australia, soil is rarely more than a metre deep: it’s dandruff. The roots of your flavour are in the skull beneath! This map is available in various formats from the Department of Primary Industries and Resources South Australia. Click hereto read how it happened.

Ultimately, people aren’t supposed to live in the desert "I truly believe that human beings in mass should not be living in environments like that, because they do nothing but destroy it. There’s no benefit to us being there… except getting a tan or something, maybe solar energy. Tucson is dealing with the fact that their water supply is supposed to only last for another 20 years or something, so they’ll have to divert another river to the city. There are no wild rivers left in America, every single one of them has a dam on it, mostly because people live out West and they shouldn’t." Daniel Ross 30 March 2009 The Quietus

All the DRINKSTER cartoons are by the great George Grainger Aldridge, SA Cartoonist of the Year at the 2009 Journalism Awards. George usually paints the stunning Adnyamathanha country in the FlindersRanges to our north. Contact him at aldridge_george@yahoo.com.au .

CONFESSIONS

"After enough years newspapermen begin to pall on other newspapermen; they begin to take their good qualities for granted and wince at their shortcomings, of which the most common are a vanity that sometimes borders on the thespian and a sort of perpetual mental adolescence that I think stems from starting a fresh story every day or every week or month and never having time to get to the bottom of anything. They forget that newspapermen as a class have a yearning for truth as involuntary as a hophead’s addiction to junk. The question of whether the junkie really loves hop is academic; he can’t get along without it. A newspaperman may write a lie to hold his job, but he won’t believe it, and the necessity outrages him so that he craves truth all the more thereafter. A few newspapermen lie to get on in the world, but it outrages them, too, and I have never known a dishonest journalist who wasn’t patently an unhappy bastard."

A.J. Liebling,

war correspondent,

New Yorker,

Algiers,

January 1942.

“Chook's got really bad taste in clothes. It's quite confronting first thing in the morning the day after visiting 57 wineries, breweries, restaurants and bottle shops. But the reality is that no-one besides Chook could actually get you to those 57 events in one day (and pick you up from the airport), and if you want to back it up and try the remaining 482 attractions in the area you know you have to put up with the cringeworthy (but matching) vest and bowtie. Oh, and Chook only seems to like two types of music - country and western. This is best dealt with by letting Chook do what he does best (take you to the best wineries in a fastidiously timely manner and introduce you to his winemaking mates) and just getting so smashed that you can't remember how bad his music was ... Mrs Chook helps out too and she's much easier on the eye. Oh and be warned, Mr Chook senior occasionally jumps on board to get free trips to the TAB, so make sure you have some good tips on the nags ... Also, be careful about discussing your onanistic tendencies (who cares if you're lefthanded?) during your winetastings - Mrs Chook is not always as completely out of earshot as you might think she is ... Overall it's very obvious that Chook has absolutely no concern about your liver. But if you want friendly service, appropriate ‘space’, good advice, and patience with a smile, then get Chook to drive you all around the McLaren Vale!”

A recent discussion in the store with a self proclaimed “wine headhunter” who only wanted to talk about wines that had been scored 95/100 or above by America’s most influential / misdirected / irrelevant to your everyday wine with dinner and friends wine scribe got us thinking.......Our friend reacted fairly violently when we characterized the Zinfandels that would be Port made by Mr. Parker’s personal “Wine Goddess” as being like “A drag queen in the middle of a great production of Carmen, totally over the top and not really germane to the context (dinner!)” which led us to think about the sort of ratings RPjr might give some of our favorite musicians:

John Lee Hooker “It Serves you Right to Suffer”

(MCAD 12025 re-issue of the classic 1965 LP)

“Strangely rustic, a throwback to another era before the advent of modern studio wizardry which could have given this original version of “Sugar Mama” the power and intensity later achieved by Foghat in their cover version. This listener had figured out by the fourth track (“You’re Wrong”) that Mr. Hooker seems to be in a bad mood, yet he went on for another 20 minutes with titles like ‘Money’ (he doesn’t have any) and ‘Serves you right to suffer’ 68/100.” To which the only possible response is “Boom! Boom!! Boom!!! How! How!! How!!! Boogie Chillin! It’s in ya and it’s GOT to come out!”

James Brown avec les JBs!!! “Love Power Peace”

live in Paris 1971 (Polydor 314-513-389-2)

“While certainly heartfelt, Mr. Brown’s tortured vocal performance could benefit greatly from the modern production techniques that bring such inner consistency and radio-friendly textures to New World Soul Crooners like Michael Bolton and George Michael. The back-up band, while certainly capable, seems bent on endlessly repeating fairly simple rhythmic patterns (called “grooves”) that appear to have stirred up the French audience but lack any real complexity..72/100, not recommended.” To which we reply “Yo Mama! Get on the Good Foot, Hit me Maceo!”

And some not so favorite musicians: The Music Advocate Pick ‘o the Month

Judas Priest Greatest Hits “Breakin the Law, a tribute to Beavis and Butthead”

“Intense, complex, ponderous, with oodles and oodles of layered slabs of hot molten metal guitar and primal scream vocals seamlessly integrated in backward masking that just might drive you to suicide!” 99/100!!!!!!!!!!

Coda

(for Laurence Smulders

4 April 1932 - 28 June 1997)

Some go without any money,

Some go without any clothes;

Some go like ants stuck in honey,

Some go where nobody goes.

Philip White

GOOD ISLAMIC ADVICE

“Ale, especially that made from barley, clogs the sinews, causes headache and congestion of the head, yet it overstimulates the action of the kidneys, and, when drunk to excess, lowers the temperature.That, however, which is brewed from wheat, and is flavoured with mint and parsley, is judged better for everybody.Still, in the case of persons exposed to the sun’s heat, in feverish conditions and sultry weather, its use is inadvisable.”

From The Science Of Dining – A Medieval Treatise on the Hygiene of the Table and the Laws of Health, translated from the Latin by Arthur S. Way D. Lit, MacMillan, 1936.Previous translation The Schoolmaster, 1583. Original text from Mohammed ibn Zakariya al Razi, Arabic medical writer (865-925AD).